In depth: UK space sector reaches for the stars

The UK might not engage in the cosmic willy-waving of manned
missions as a point of national pride, but it is finding innovative
ways to commercialise the space sector

Do you remember the first time you watched Sky TV? Are those
first few hours of flicking listlessly between Man v.
Food and reruns of House,
as you shovelled handfuls of cereal between box and mouth, etched
into your mind? How about your inaugural journey navigating with
only a mobile maps app? Did you cast your tatty A to
Z aside, marvelling at the technofruits of human
endeavour? Probably not.

What is remarkable about satellite TV and GPS is that they are
space technologies -- they rely on signals beamed from hundreds of
kilometres away from (often British-built) satellites orbiting the
Earth -- and yet somehow they have become ubiquitous, readily
accepted and to many people -- dare I say it --pedestrian.
While other countries engage in the cosmic willy-waving of manned
missions and interplanetary colonisation as a matter of
nationalistic pride, the UK's main strengths lie in less
ostentatious endeavours.

"Historically the UK government hasn't put many resources into
these big prestige project like launchers or manned missions,"
David Parker, chief executive of the UK Space Agency,
told Wired.co.uk. "The ISS has cost the US more than $100
billion. We have not put money into those kinds of projects. We
have taken a very commercial and mean and lean approach, but
technologically and scientifically what we are doing is top
notch."

After the US and Russia, the UK became the third space-faring
nation fifty years ago with the launch of the Ariel-1 satellite.
Because of the lack of government funding, the UK space sector has
grown to be very nimble, commercial and sustainable. The country's
expertise lies in building space infrastructure that provides very
practical, commercial applications on Earth, such as
telecommunications, weather forecasting, navigation and planetary
observation. The UK is one of the few countries with a well-rounded
space sector that combines a strong academic community with
manufacturing capabilities and services.

Space industry leaders
Space contributes an estimated £9.1 billion to the economy
(2010/2011), with an average growth rate of around 7.5 percent.
Some of the major players in the sector include Avanti, Astrium,
Inmarsat and Sky's parent company BSkyB. And these high-tech
enterprises are producing some extraordinary products and
services.

UK space sector

Galileo spacecraft formation. Credit: OHB System AG

London-based Avanti Communications has developed the Hylas 1 and
2 satellites, which have highly accurate steerable beam technology
that allows spot delivery of broadband connectivity to places where
it isn't economically viable to provide a fibre or cable link.
Meanwhile Astrium -- Europe's largest space company -- recently won
a €300m contract from the European Space Agency (ESA) to build a
heat shield-protected spacecraft called Solar
Orbiter, which will perform close-up, high resolution studies
of the Sun and inner heliosphere. Inmarsat has a fleet of ten
satellites which provide global voice, data and IP communications,
particularly for maritime clients.

One of the most remarkable British companies in the sector is Surrey Satellite Technology
(SSTL), a spin-out from the University of Surrey, which has a
vision to drastically reduce the cost of satellite technology to
make space more accessible and within reach of almost every nation.
SSTL's bespoke satellites typically take 18 months to build and
carry payloads of less than 1,000kg. The company has managed to
design, build and launch 39 satellites in less than 30 years and is
currently producing the 22 satellites for Galileo, Europe's global
navigation system. The company is also working on an innovative
type of radar imaging satellite, called NovaSar-S. This works by
using synthetic aperture radar, allowing it to see through clouds
(unlike optical satellites), and costs around £45m -- roughly 20
percent of the cost of existing space radar platforms.

Key to SSTL's success has been its use of consumer-grade
electronics, such as those from the automotive industry, as opposed
to limiting itself to using only high reliability space-qualified
components. This allows the company to take
advantage of the huge R&D investment (and fiercer competition)
of the automotive and consumer electronics sectors. The
company also takes an iterative approach to developing satellites,
instead of starting from scratch with each new client as other
companies do.

"Just as the mobile phone industry produces new devices that are
modified versions of the last one, we try to do the same with our
low-cost satellites," Doug Liddle, head of science at SSTL, told
Wired.co.uk. "We look at the top level requirements and check
whether we've built a similar satellite before. We then end up
looking at the differences between them and working on those areas.
You might end up with something with too much processing power than
you need, but it doesn't matter because you've got loads of margin
and you don't have to design something else. This allows us to
short circuit some of the lower level testing, because we know
these units work and they work together."

The "smartphone satellite"
SSTL is currently looking at whether a smartphone could be used to
drive a satellite with its experimental Strand-1 mission. The 30cm-cubed satellite, which launches
later this month [February 2013], will carry Google's Nexus 1
Android smartphone into polar orbit. The tiny CubeSat -- made with
commercial off-the-shelf components (COTS) from a range of European
companies including Glasgow-based Clyde Space -- will initially be
controlled by a Linux-based computer, before the team tests whether
it can transfer control of the satellite to the mobile device..

"Smartphones have many of the subsystems that a spacecraft has
-- a great processor, camera, communications, power system, GPS,"
said Liddle. "If this plug and play approach works, we could
massively reduce our schedules and costs. It also means you have a
huge developer community and you can leverage everything that
happens in the terrestrial consumer electronics market and use it
in space -- that's a market with a lot of funding."

The team sees Strand-1 as an education project. "It's difficult
to do innovation on commercial missions, so you need to find
different ways to take risks," explains Liddle. Crucially, the team
has been told it is allowed to fail -- something that is not an
option with commercial missions. "We've learned around 80 percent
of what we hoped to learn on the ground and we now have to see if
we can learn the last 20 percent by seeing if it works in
orbit."

The phone will also take pictures of Earth and of the Moon using
its 5-megapixel camera, and it will run a number of dedicated apps,
such as Scream In Space -- inspired by Alien --
which allows members of the public to upload videos of themselves
screaming that will be played once it's in orbit. There will also
be tests to see if the system can use wireless connectivity rather
than a hard USB connector. "We can then start looking at whether
the phone needs to be in the satellite to control it over a
wireless link and we could potentially create a Wi-Fi constellation
of satellites in space," Liddle adds.

In addition to seeing whether a mobile phone can take control of
the CubeSat, a whole host of other experiments are planned,
including the testing of an innovative miniature propulsion system, which consists of eight 10g
microthrusters. These produce thrust by discharging a series of
pulses -- small electrical sparks that are accelerated by
electromagnetic forces. A second propulsion system -- known as Warp
Drive -- relies on a mixture of water and alcohol. Phase
two of the Strand programme will involve docking a nanosatellite in
orbit with the help of Kinect technology.

It's this sort of innovation that the UK Space Agency wants to
foster, with plans to encourage space startups through funding from
the Technology Strategy Board and the launch of an innovation
centre called the Satellite Applications Catapult. The aim is to
turn the area around the Harwell science campus in Oxfordshire --
where there is already a thriving space cluster thanks to the
Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and a European Space Agency presence
-- into a "Space
City" in the same way that the Silicon Roundabout area of East
London has become a Tech City. "We want a national space park with
companies and universities and government laboratories all
alongside each other and bouncing off each other and generating new
ideas," explains Parker.

Reach for the stars
By "being open and imaginative to new ideas" the UK can continue
to grow the sector with minimal involvement from the government.
Parker explains that currently the Space Agency "only" puts in a
few hundred million a year, while the whole sector is worth £9
billion. However, there are ambitious plans to double the UK's
market share in space to ten percent by 2030, which would mean a
£40 billion contribution to the economy.

There remains plenty of room for growth in fields where the UK
is already successful, as demand for the high-speed transmission of
data for communications grows exponentially. While fibre optics
might be the preferred networking option for urban areas,
spot-delivery of high speed broadband might be preferable for more
remote areas, particularly in developing markets or those where
infrastructure has been ravaged by conflict. Furthermore, as
climate change takes its toll and global populations burgeon, the
ability to monitor crop yields and model calamitous weather events
will become more critical -- this sort of Earth observation also
relies on satellites. It's not just a matter of gathering the data,
but also receiving it at ground stations, processing it and
developing applications -- and the associated intellectual property
-- for that data.

One area where the UK has yet to make much headway is in
launcher facilities. The country has traditionally relied on other
countries to launch satellites and other instruments into space,
which means a lack of control over terms and timings of launches.
One company -- Reaction Engines -- is hoping to address this with
its highly innovative hypersonic engine technology Sabre, which
would allow aircraft to travel at up to five times the speed of
sound. This has been possible through the development of
ultra-lightweight heat exchangers, 100 times lighter than existing
technology, that cool the very hot airstreams entering a jet
engine. The miniaturisation of these heat exchanges was inspired by
a similar trend in silicon chips -- something that spurred Alan
Bond to set up the company in 1989.

The company's most attention-grabbing application of this engine
technology is in the Skylon reusable spaceplane, which could take off and land
horizontally and fly to anywhere in world (or directly into space)
within four hours. It could also launch satellites into space much
more cheaply than existing launchers, which require multiple
single-use propellant stages. The engine would use oxygen in the
atmosphere before switching to rocket power for the ride in
space.

Currently it's still a concept. Reaction Engines is building a
full working engine in three to four years, but there won't be a
full vehicle until the early 2020s. In the interim, there are some
major regulatory hurdles to overcome.

Climb every mountain
Because of Skylon's unique capabilities -- a reusable, unmanned
vehicle that is part aeroplane and part rocket -- it does not fit
into any current regulatory regime. As a result, Reaction Engines
is in discussions with the British government, European Commission
and eventually the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in
the US.

Once the regulatory restrictions are out of the way, Reaction
Engines' technology could revolutionise not only space access, but
also high speed commercial flight. Although "that commercial market
is difficult, as demonstrated by Concorde", explains the company's
head of business development, Ben Gallagher. "That's not to say
that in the longer term it may become viable, but there is latent
demand for reliable, cost-effective space launch at the
moment."

"This could be the silicon chip of aerospace in terms of being
able to commercialise this technology and the potential economies
of scale. We are entering a new era of the engine," added
Gallagher, boldly but not entirely unreasonably.

This leaves one major gap in the UK's space capabilities: a
spaceport. Although Skylon would most likely launch from nearer the
equator, where the surface of the Earth is traveling faster, there
is still a role for a UK spaceport, particularly for launching
scientific instruments into polar orbit. This is something that the
burgeoning space sector in Scotland is lobbying
for.

Further down the line, this could even allow for space tourism,
at least if Virgin Galactic's Richard Branson has anything to do with it.
Having opened a spaceport in the US, he's keen to open one in Abu
Dhabi and then Europe.

"If we can get the policy and regulation right, we'd like to see
a space tourism industry come to the UK in good time," concluded
Barker.

It's certainly a big, capital-intensive "if", but one that is in
keeping with David Willett's willingness for the UK to take more
risks when it comes to science, as expressed in a speech at think tank Policy Exchange: "Some of the
technologies for which we have high hopes today will turn out to be
clunkers tomorrow. That is because this is all about taking risk --
if the risk was much lower then we could indeed leave it to
straightforward business decisions."

Comments

The biggest challenge for the UK space industry is how to delivery on the promise of growth. In response to the request from the industry, the UK government has put a considerable amount of money on table and in so doing so, thrown the gauntlet down to UK space. To grow from a £7bn industry to one worth £40bn within 17 years is aggressive – some say unrealistic – for a notoriously risk adverse industry. The growth required will not come from the large players. Whilst they might have the tools required: access to cash &amp; talent, they don't have the mind-set: risk-aversion &amp; bureaucracy can only produce incremental growth.

We need to look to SMEs for the stellar levels of growth required: somewhere in the UK the next 'Google of space' is lurking as a pipedream in someone's head. Turning a dream to reality is not a job for the faint-hearted. Raising finance for a start-up in the space industry that's looking at anything other than downstream service requires particular tenacity and thick skin. With the fresh injection of cash into the sector we'll see SMEs springing up in incubation centres all over the UK developing exciting data services. Natural selection will kill off all but the most resilient management teams &amp; commercially viable ideas.

The challenge lies with hardware development. Downstream can only exist with upstream. To deliver next-gen data services we need next-gen hardware. Exciting developments are taking place in UK SMEs in the areas of antennas, electronics and structures (3D printing in particular). Attracting conventional funding into a space hardware 'newco' is impossible. The time horizon, cap-ex required and 'niche' market are all major turn-offs for all but a few and rare angel investors. Start-ups - as ever - remain way outside the investment profile of VCs and banks.

What the UK really needs is a level of financial innovation on a par with that of its technical innovation. Crack this and we stand a chance of achieving the 6 fold increase the government now expects….